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Cold sea air rolled in across the island, bringing a chilly end to the warm august day. All around her porch lights and street lamps came alive in the dusk, illuminating the sandy boardwalks and old footpaths. Millie could hear the final cries of gulls overhead, headed out to the sea to roost for the night. As she ambled peacefully along, children on bikes waved to her as they scurried home, or more likely, to the Uppards for the evening. All around her the island was quieting, homes grew dark, boat motors ceased to rumble and the night took hold. But Millie continued to walk along the familiar path, past the sand dunes and beach roses, past the docks and moored boats all in a line. Eventually, sand and scrub bushes turned to grass and the boards beneath her feet became pavement, pine trees dotted along the road, their soft fallen needles a thin carpet under foot. She walked on past the general store, its windows dark and shutters down for the night, and headed determinedly on towards the edge of town.
Crockett was a small island and she had walked this path countless times, on Christmas Eve in the snow, on Easter Morning before sunrise, and nearly every day in between. She thought she could walk here in her sleep, and sometimes wondered if she walked here in her dreams.
St. Patrick’s was a simple church, for a simple island and it came with an ordinary priest to absolve them of their ordinary sins.
But Father John Pruitt had never been ordinary to her, and their sins had never been anything close to simple.
Millie took a final moment to steel herself before pushing wide the doors.
The ancient church creaked something awful, the sound of old hinges and even older wood echoing above her in the arched ceiling. The noise would have betrayed anyone attempting to covertly enter the church, something Millie knew well from experience. But there was no need for subterfuge tonight, nor would there ever be again.
Entering the hallowed hall, she wasn’t surprised to find the candles still lit, the fluorescents still humming, and Father Pruitt still making final touches for tomorrow's ceremony. The smell of incense, pine and sea air drifted pleasantly through the chapel, quaint and comforting.
Millie looked about, the church had undergone a delightful transformation since the conclusion of afternoon mass. Down the aisle white fabric had been rolled and was lined with vases of wildflowers. The simple bouquets had been gifts from neighbors, acquaintances and strangers alike. There hadn’t been a wedding on Crockett in years, and the town virtually hummed in anticipation.
At the end of white carpet, just before the altar, was a small arched trellis, which Millie recognized from the community vegetable garden. It was white once, but the paint had yellowed in the sun and seawater had scraped away the finish. It was beautiful nonetheless, now decorated with white lilies from the mainland. She’d heard the flowers had been ferried over by a kind fisherman late that evening, so they would still be fresh in the morning.
But most beautiful of all, below the arch, sitting on the ground amongst the flower clippings and bits of string, Father Pruitt, securing the last few lilies to the base of the trellis.
“You’re still here,” Millie said, gently stepping her way along the white carpet, careful not to damage it before the ceremony. “You should be resting before your big day tomorrow.”
“Shouldn’t that be my line, young lady?” John Pruitt set down the flower clippers, sitting back on his heels to look at her. “The congregation wanted this to be a surprise.”
“Well,” Millie smiled wistfully, settling down in the front pew, “nothing ever really stays a secret on Crockett, does it John?” She pulled her feet up onto the bench, knees against her chest, hugging herself against the cool evening air.
“I’m not worried about what the people of Crockett Island think, Millie... I will ‘not be afraid in any man’s presence, for the judgment is God’s.’” As he spoke, his voice dipped into the sonorous tone he reserved for sermons. Millie had never appreciated being preached at outside of mass.
“And what does God think of us, John? Tomorrow, I will walk through His house in my white dress and stand before you in your white chasuble. And you’ll espouse love and faith and purity...” She turned from him, arms pulling tighter around her body, like she could hold in the anger and grief through brute force. “John, we have to end this.”
John looked as though he had been struck, like her mere voice had slapped him. The moment hung while Millie's words dissipated through the rafters, before settling around them like dust.
“Millie,” John faltered, instinctively moving towards her, an awkward shuffling motion across the floor, just a few feet to bring him chest height with the pew she sat on. Taking her hand and looking up into her eyes. “I- I know that tomorrow, I will marry you to another man, and yes, he will be your husband, and he will love you as himself- and you will become as one, and sacred in the eyes of God.” John paused to swallow a growing tightness in his throat before continuing. “And I know how it is to be a bride, Millie. I am espoused to one husband, a chaste virgin to Christ-”
Nearly too quick to see, Millie snatched her hand from his and struck him across the face. The noise echoed up to the rafters, and his head jerked to the side, frozen there.
“John, enough! You’re no virgin, and neither am I. What we did, it wasn't holy, John, it wasn’t sacred . It was human and ordinary.” She clamped her hand across her mouth, shocked at her outburst and the speed of the blow; her palm stung with it, a pleasurable tingle that crawled its way up her arm. Millie could no longer hide the tears on the edges of her eyes. John didn’t look, but stayed on his knees next to her, head hung in shame and contemplation. It was a long moment before he raised his eyes to meet her again, his gaze full to the brim with longing and sorrow.
“You're my penance, Millie. I've been on my knees countless times before my God, and yet I've never felt such trepidation and awe as when I’m on my knees for you.” Cautiously, reverently, he reached a hand out to touch her knee. “I won’t say it is a sin, Millie, not you. Perhaps I am a virgin in body no longer, but my spirit has been made purer for the love of you. I’ve been made low and humbled and wretched by your touch, and it was sacred, and it would be blasphemy to deny it.”
Something reliably soft inside Millie went hard and cold. It had taken all her strength to come here tonight, to do the decent thing and hope they would make this sacrifice together. And somehow he had the audacity to reject this offer she gave him- this offer of ordinary humanity, of normality . He would deny her to wake in the morning and walk down the aisle to the mundanity and peace she so desperately wanted. Milie asked for mortality and all he had to respond with was the divine.
“Then blaspheme,” Millie’s hand wrapped into his hair, pulling hard at the base of his skull. Her tears were gone and her voice was unrecognizable. “Be like Peter and deny your God.”
John’s eyes widened, pupils dilating even further in the dim light. Millie could feel the sudden droop in his shoulders, the weakening in his knees as he sank further to the floor at her feet. He was so malleable in her hands, and she adored him for it. It was intoxicating the way he would melt from her mere voice and debase himself with hardly a touch.
“ ‘Even if I have to die with You, I will never deny You.’” He turned his eyes up to her, wide and scared, and full of love.
Without a moment's hesitation, Millie drew back her hand and struck him again, her other hand still anchored firmly in his hair. The crack resonated throughout the chapel, followed by the softer sound of John’s stifled moan.
So many times he’d asked her to strike him, and she had always denied him, afraid of what she’d find in herself if she did. But tonight was the end of it all, and she would force him once and for all to see that this was profane.
“ ‘You also were with Jesus of Galilee.’ ” Millie intoned, voice husky from tears. But the words came to her easily, it was not only John who could quote scripture during sex. Twenty years spending half her days in church every week, learning to read off of the thin pages, Millie knew the passages well. And after three years with John, she often thought of blasphemy. Sacrilege an old and familiar stirring heat in her belly, and it was with her now as she lifted one leg off the bench and placed it over John’s shoulder.
“‘I do not know what you are saying...’” he mumbled, throat thick and voice creaky, his head low, nearly resting on the seat of the pew. Unfocused and unbalanced as he recovered from the strike, hands gripping onto the pew for dear life.
Millie pulled his head up, using her hold in his hair to direct his gaze and the leverage with her leg to pull him closer. She looked down at him and smiled thinly.
“‘This fellow also was with Jesus of Nazareth!’” She wrenched his hair hard, till another moan escaped his lips. She would make him deny his Lord over and over until he was well and thoroughly broken. Until he truly felt his shame and wept as Peter wept.
“‘I do not know the Man!’“ He gasped out the words, pained, turning his head towards her thigh now resting on his shoulder. Mouth open and breathing hard against her skin. He squirmed under her leg, head pulling against her grip.
Millie allowed her back to slide further down the pew, her free leg coming up and over John’s shoulder. His hands that had been gripping the pew seat, now finding her hips to help her angle herself towards him. As she slid down, she dragged him with her, pulling back her skirt with her free hand.
“ ‘Surely you also are one of them, for your speech betrays you...’” It was Millie’s turn to mutter the words, as she tilted her head back. She could no longer see John, but she could feel him, his breath and mouth warm on her thighs.
“I- I- I don’t know, I don’t know Him, Millie, I don’t know the- fuck,” John stumbled uncharacteristically over the half-finished quote, panting hot, gusting breaths against the sensitive inside of her thigh. Millie pulled on his hair once more, guiding him none too gently to where he belonged.
“I’m not your eucharist, John. I’m the fruit you must eat to know your own shame.”
He groaned against her, the noise vibrating pleasantly between her legs as he rubbed his cheek against the soft thatch of hair at her center, his lips brushing her reverently. He licked at her once, twice, soft and almost hesitant. She wasn’t fooled. He wanted this, needed it, no matter how filthy it was or how anyone might condemn him for it.
In the echoing silence of the church- the screaming of late cicadas, the constant reassuring sound of the waves, the creak of the old wood over their heads- Millie realized that, for once, John had just handed her the opportunity to castigate him without interruption.
She softened her grip on his hair, already feeling a twinge of guilt; she had to have hurt him. Brushing the thought aside, she raked her nails against his scalp and pressed him deeper, the pads of her fingers digging pressure along the soft place at the top of his spine. “All your quotations,” she muttered, feeling the shivers running down his spine underneath her heels. “I suppose you have to use those years of seminary education for something. Like justifying our fucking.”
He twitched under her, pausing in his ministrations. She could feel his ragged breath underneath her skirt as he shrank from the obscenity.
Inexorable, she wound her fingers back into his hair- exactly the way he liked, her fingers twisting tight right at the base of his neck- and pushed him back to work. “It’s as though you can’t admit you want this,” she said, the sound of her own voice tinny and strange. “You have to cloak it in all this talk, all this poetry, so that you don’t have to think about the fact that your cock is hard. Or that I put you on your knees like this. Or pin you down and fuck you-” he stilled again at the word, but his hips bucked and she knew she had him, thrusting herself up into his mouth in turn as her belly caught fire, “ fuck you until you beg , John.”
A soft, whimpered noise between her thighs had her clutching at him, clawing at the back of his neck. This hadn’t always felt so good; she’d had to teach him, fumbling through things that neither of them knew any words for. But he learned. Oh, her clever boy, he learned quickly and he was so eager to please- his hands pulled him closer, warm and strong along the small of her back, and she flung her head back as his tongue hit her just right, the wooden back of the pew biting into her neck.
“This is dirty,” Millie forced the words out through her own shame, wanting to rub John’s nose in the baseness of it, “and sinful, and wrong. And you like it.”
He moaned against her center, agonized, and she whined as her legs convulsed with pleasure, heels driving into his back. It felt so good to hurt him, to shame him. He was on his knees cringing before her and she was powerful . No longer was she a half-forgotten middle child, or a good little Catholic girl. In the morning she would be a fisherman’s wife but right now she was John Pruitt’s God.
“You want this.” Millie panted and clawed at him, raking her hand down to his shoulders, hand slipping down the back of his shirt to find clean skin she could mark up. She wanted to know that his flesh was beneath her nails during her wedding. “You need this. Debased on the floor of your church because you can’t resist going to your knees for me-”
John took a rasping, rattling breath, laying his head against her thigh as he broke from her, gasping for air and whining as it left him. Millie jerked in his arms, scratching at what she could reach of his back, but part of her was relieved at the cold air, the cessation of pleasure. That- that had felt... cruel. She didn’t want to be that.
But the power high still pounded through her with her heartbeat, her peak fading away as she calmed. She carded her hands through his sweaty curls, listening to his breathing hitch on little sobbing noises. Hurting him felt so good. She wanted to kick him, knock him to the floor and pin him there like an insect. She wanted to take a discipline to his back like he was a saint, split his skin open and spill his blood like an offering.
This was why she could never bring herself to give John the suffering he wanted. The cruelty pumped through her blood and she wondered if this was how God felt, raining fire down on Sodom and Gomorrah. If He took pleasure in the destruction and satisfaction from wrecking the wicked.
John’s breathing started to calm against her leg. Millie rubbed her thumb along the shell of his ear, his hands stroking warm pressure at her hips, half her weight resting on his forearms. Her world tilted a little as she thought about how strong he was- he could pick her up and fuck her here on the pew. Slim as she was, he could easily throw her over his shoulders and do whatever he wanted. But instead he was curled up on the cold floor, panting and shivering and desperate for mercy, hers or God’s. And that was the problem, wasn’t it.
“I love you, John,” Millie thumbed a stray lock of dark hair from his sweaty forehead, his face flushed and stained with her. “But I don’t want to be worshipped and I’m not anyone’s salvation.” She gently pushed him back and straightened her skirt, heartbeat still pounding between her legs.
John twitched forward against her hand, begging with silent, pleading eyes, but he went dutifully where she put him.
She took a long last look at him, knowing that this was how she wanted to remember him forever. Collapsed at her feet, breath heavy and eyes wide with lust, not even attempting to hide how hard she had made him. Self-satisfied in the knowledge that when she left, he wouldn’t even touch himself, not without her there to absolve him of the sin.
Millie, though, would go home to her maiden bed for the last time, trying not to wake her sisters as she brought herself back to her interrupted pleasure thinking of... not George, but not John, either. Maybe just that incandescent rush of power that she was letting go, now, before it burned her.
John simply nodded, his hands slipping from her legs to twist and wring in desperate fists at his sides. Eyes squeezed shut like a child struggling to understand the unfairness of the world. His lips moved, whispering fragmented prayers and repentances, “ ...all come from dust, and to dust all return...Who knows if the human spirit rises upward... ”
With a final tender touch, Millie cradled his face, bringing his soft, fluttering eyes to hers once more. His stubble was rough under her fingers, his cheeks warm and still covered in evidence of her pleasure.
“‘ The dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.’ We’re human, John, for better or worse. Unremarkable and impetuous and flawed. You and I, we’ll all turn to dust in the end.” She held his face and sank into his dark eyes, “I want a boring, unremarkable, beautiful life John. I want to grow old on this island and fade away when my time comes, and I can’t have that with you.”
“I know,” John managed the words, “and I want you to have that ordinary life, Millie. Free of me and free of this. ” He took a ragged breath before forcing a sad smile for her. “I’m happy for you, you deserve a loving husband and beautiful children, and I pray that- that you know nothing but peace all the days of your life.”
With delicate fingers, she traced his lips with her thumb, smoothing out the frown lines along his pretty mouth. John Pruitt was many things, a skillful liar was not one of them- at least not to her, who had spent so long watching him, learning him. But she appreciated his words nonetheless. He was letting her go, blessing her future, even if it was one without him in it. A lesser man might resent her choice, for peace and stability over excitement and desire, but not him. And she loved him all the more for it.
“You’re a good man, John,” she released him from her grasp one final time. “A terrible priest,” she added sardonically, “but a good man, with a good heart, don’t forget that.”
He nodded again, uncharacteristically lost for words, swaying on his knees like a man in a desert, watching an oasis mirage disappear.
Millie stood on shaking legs. She’d already stayed too long. Nothing ever really stays a secret on Crockett...
“Millie,” John’s voice cracked and she thought he might be about to cry, but when she turned to him, he seemed to have regained control. His eyes were sad, but wistful, the glimmer of a smile beginning to shine through. “Maybe in a different life we...” But he trailed off, shaking his head with a sad laugh. “Maybe...?”
“Yeah,” Millie smiled, feeling new tears well up in her own eyes as she briefly allowed the same fantasy to wander into her mind. John would make an absentminded father, a little too godly and a little too removed. But she could see him reading aloud, helping her cook, talking about anything and everything. Sermons in her living room. Wandering the island together before sunrise, holding his hand and kissing him in the early morning light... “In a different life.”